DRYAS OCTOPETALA. 
garden also as to provide just that company and stimulating rivalry 
which the capricious beauty so misses when planted in splendid chilly 
isolation. But in the garden it might be feared the Dryas may prove 
a rather overpowering neighbour. This may easily be raised from 
fresh-sown seed, but takes two or three years to reach any fair flowering 
size, and yet more to make a mat of any amplitude. So that it is well 
to remember that August cuttings stuck in sand, root with the most 
perfect promptitude and ease ; while in the Alps, if found growing on 
sandy or limy hummocks in loose soil, mats of the Dryas may be torn 
without damage from their thick wooden trunk, for all along their 
arm’s length they will have been stimulated by the sand into rooting 
with fine new fibres, so that the whole may be sent home as it stands, 
and as it stands put straight into more sand, and then into the garden, 
or else divided at pleasure into many comfortable rooting fragments 
and grown on for next season. On the other hand, little but failure 
ever results from the laborious collection of young seedlings in the 
Alps, for these have only the one seedling root, already growing woody, 
for their subsistence ; they bitterly resent the disturbance of this, and 
very rarely re-establish. The type is of enormous range over all the 
alpine chains, but varies to a certain extent in its forms—that of the 
Mont Cenis being as conspicuously large and glorious and free as almost 
everything else that hails from that marvellous if non-existent moun- 
tain ; while in the Dolomites, as a rule, Dryas octopetala is so squinny 
and poor as hardly to be recognisable. Forms have been found, too, 
with flowers double or semi-double, or with a second row of petals re- 
curving, so as to give a cup-and-saucer effect ; while both the Engadine 
and Monte Baldo have yielded a variety whose blossoms as they open 
are of a very soft and shell-pink flush, which tends, however, to fade, 
like other roseate hues of early dawn, under the fierce white light that 
beats upon the garden. And hardly more than local developments 
again are the other Dryads, D. integrifolia, which often appears under 
its secondary name as D. tenella, Pursh—a pretty miniature of the 
Royal Oak, with tiny leaves curling over at the edges, so as to lose 
their scalloped effect, and with the delicate flowers on a scale to match 
the plant; and also D. lanata (sometimes D. vestita), another little 
variety, differing not only in lessened habit, but in a coating all over 
of fine greyish down. These are both as easy as the type, though much 
smaller and neater, for a choicer place—D. lanata being rather the 
more spreading of the two; and much the same may be said in praise 
of our own delightful form, D. octopeiala minor, from Arnclifie Clouder, 
a dainty Octopetala divided by half in all its parts. D. Drummondii, 
however, is a disappointment, from the stony places of the Canadian 
(1,919) . 321 x 
